On trips to China in the 1930's to acquire feathers, Mr. Wolff began buying archaic bronzes and Asian sculpture.

Before his death in 1988, he wrote a distinguished history of Chinese textile design through the ages and a careful study of archaic bronze mirrors.

A superb bottle in a plain antique style is colored a smoky Korean green; a tripod incense burner adopts the form of an archaic Chinese bronze but sets the solid legs of the original at a woozy tilt.

The island first attracted the notice of archaeologists by the remarkable archaic Greek bronzes found in a cave on Mount Ida in 1885, as well as by epigraphic monuments such as the famous law of Gortyna.

As part of the weeklong celebration of Asian art in New York, Sotheby's is auctioning more than 150 of Mr. Ellsworth's Chinese archaic bronzes on Tuesday.

Cyrus and Mildred Churchill of Moline, Ill., had bought Chinese jades, archaic bronzes, ceramics and paintings throughout their 65-year marriage and displayed them in their home, a former bowling alley, named Concordia House.

Gilbert Zuellig specialized in early pottery, stoneware and ceramics, spanning five millennia from the Neolithic period to the Han, Tang and Song Dynasties, while his brother Stephen collected the later porcelains of the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties as well as archaic bronzes.

The Chinese decorative-arts sale (Sept. 15) concentrates on ceramics, paintings, and jades, such as an exquisite Quanlong white-jade vase made in the eighteenth century and decorated with taotie masks inspired by the designs of archaic bronzes.

He is now offering a broader range of Oriental works, from archaic bronzes to contemporary paintings and ceramics.

Also included are jade versions of archaic bronzes, a reminder of the fundamental conservatism of Chinese art, and examples of Indian Mughal jades.